Being a textbook can be tough. It’s a hard knock life getting chucked into backpacks and lockers, after all. It’s also tough being a kid that has to lug around 20 pounds of assorted books all day long while trudging up and down the stairs (or around campus) at school. The dead-tree drudgery could soon be at an end, however, if the Plastic Logic 100 eReader catches on.

It all starts with a daylight-readable, shatterproof 10.7-inch touchscreen display that pushes 960 x 1280 pixels. Inside, the Plastic Logic 100 hides an 800MHz processor and 4GB of storage — which plays host to the Windows CE operating system and provides room for “a year’s worth of textbooks.” It’s less than 8mm thick and weighs about one pound. A fully-charged battery will provide students with about one week of use.

Atop Windows CE is Plastic Logic’s swipe-controlled user interface. In addition to letting students flip through pages, the software allows bookmarking, highlighting, and notes “in the margins” via an on-screen keyboard. Text is also fully searchable, a truly killer feature when it comes to studying hundreds or thousands of pages for a semester exam.

Right now, the Plastic Logic 100 is priced at 12,000 Russian Rubles — about $400 at the current exchange rate. That might seem a bit steep, but when you consider that textbooks can cost anywhere from $70 to $200, it’s really not a bad price at all — especially since the Russian sticker price also covers 40 pre-loaded titles aimed at regional grade 6 and 7 students. That 10.7-inch display looks quite nice too, and is far larger than the Kindle‘s 6-inch screen. Even the Kindle DX only manages 9.7-inches, and neither Kindle is touchscreen.

Here’s a Russian-language video that shows off the Plastic Logic 100 in action: